Results for: “Transportation”

Although noted primarily as an interurban system, the Lake Shore Electric operated extensive local city routes in Lorain and Sandusky plus a single franchise-required service in Norwalk. Their traffic and economic characteristics varied enormously, from heavily burdened, industrially oriented lines to casual and folksy little Toonervilles with no visible means of support.

Sandusky’s city streetcar lines were a perennially vexing financial burden, but because its interurban services depended on city franchises the company could not walk away from them. Its problems stemmed partly from early competitive overbuilding and partly from the nature and development of the city. When its horsecars began running in 1883, Sandusky’s population was more than 16,000 and it was Ohio’s eighth largest city. But afterward the city attracted little new industry and experienced little growth. There was only an 8 percent population gain between 1890 and 1910, the period when most of the streetcar lines were built. By 1920 Sandusky ranked only 24th among Ohio cities. The lines built into the outlying areas never attracted new residential subdivisions as they surely would have if Sandusky had enjoyed the remarkable expansion of some other Lake Erie shoreline cities. As a result, much of the territory served by the city cars was always relatively unproductive.

220 Still Movin’ On, Any Way They Can have since ridden over 5,000 miles of Texas back roads and streets with thousands of others astride chrome-moly mounts. It was here that I first discovered that today’s cyclists are yesterday’s cowboys.

Hear me out before you protest.

As we near the end of this century in a society that now rewards conformity over individuality, individualists still find ways to retain their independence. At the turn of the century, many individualists found solitude in becoming cowboys. Others became explorers who set out on their horses to discover new territory.

Both found particular pleasure in sharing an intimacy with the land, its people, and the abundance of nature. Today’s fenced-in, paved-over environment inspires corporate farming and cattle raising. Ours is a place hostile to the horse and cowboy. I believe these same individualists have found the bicycle.

Now I’m going to give you some numbers. But I must warn you that the only accurate horseflesh numbers come from those compiled at the turn of the century. That’s when statisticians, and other authority types, considered the horse an agricultural commodity. Today horses are no longer considered an agricultural commodity. Horses are considered recreational. Therefore, no one keeps tabs on the overall number of horses or horseback riders.

The mission for a school of the future (or the present?) should be to optimally meet children's learning needs. That carries the implicit recognition that every child's brain is unique. And whereas most brains follow a normal developmental trajectory, each is also idiosyncratic in its strengths and weaknesses for learning particular types of information

—John Geake

This chapter will address some common strategies for modifying tasks and concepts for students who are working below the basic expectations or struggling with learning differences. Included are proven differentiated strategies that should be used at RTI Tier 1 every day. Teachers must also add to their bags of tricks a variety of ways to provide lateral enrichment opportunities for students as they meet the standards and expectations. To provide all students with a level of challenge appropriate for their abilities, teachers must learn how to raise the bar and extend the learning beyond the grade-level standards.

Six days later, David Goode tried to increase the pressure by firing up further the issue of market dominance, sending a letter to shippers opposing a CSX-Conrail monopoly, and declaring that Norfolk Southern, as winning bidder, would sell off duplicating lines so that places like the Port of New York would have balanced competition. He argued that the region would be best served by two railroads of fairly equal size instead of having one that had 70 percent of the tracks and another with only 30 percent. Norfolk’s argument was embarrassing to Conrail because in the previous year in the UP merger case it had argued that rail customers needed balanced competition. Now Conrail had returned to its original stance, maintaining there was no need for two railroads. Admitted one vice president, “We were flip-flopping.” Nevertheless, trying to counter NS’s spin, CSX put out a press release dismissing Norfolk Southern’s letter as an “act of desperation.” It added that Norfolk was following “a loser’s strategy, solely intent on gaining or forcing competitive concessions.” Mark Aron, by now CSX’s executive vice president for law and public affairs, told a reporter that NS had given up on bidding and was now posturing for a battle before the Surf Board.

Many historians seem to take it for granted that the original Pennsylvania Turnpike alignment followed the defunct railroad right-of-way. It did, but mostly only in a general way, not as a duplication of the line that was surveyed and partly built. As we have just noted, except for the tunnels and a few short stretches here and there, there was very little precise correlation between the two. (There is even less now, since three tunnels—Sideling Hill, Rays Hill, and Laurel Hill—were bypassed between 1964 and 1968.) The South Penn’s engineers aimed for a maximum grade of 1 percent, with the exception of the east slope of Allegheny Mountain (at 1.8 percent) and the west slope of Laurel Hill, where 6 miles of 2 percent were necessary. To accomplish this, the railroad constantly curved through the rugged mountain territory to build up its grades gradually and avoid more hills. The Turnpike engineers could get away with triple the railroad’s ruling grade and so could cut a straighter path, deviating from the rail line as much as 3 miles. That left a lot of cuts, fills, and culverts out there that have been untouched since 1885. Not even in those relatively flat, easy areas where the South Penn had fixed a route but never built—such as the Cumberland and Raystown-Juniata valleys—did the Turnpike precisely follow the railroad survey.

The stock market had taken a dive, to be sure, but most people believed it was only a temporary hiccup — perhaps a little worse than in 1921, but nothing for serious concern. Even so, interurban lines like the Lake Shore had much to worry about. On January 18, 1930, Fred Coen wrote his mysterious master, “A. Hayes,” and began:

The time is not far distant when the question of the future policy to be followed in regard to the Lake Shore Electric must be determined. In other words, whether this railway can be rejuvenated and rebuilt so that it would be the same as an electrified steam railroad and made a profitable institution or whether it is to be abandoned, or partially abandoned, and recover therefrom as much as possible in the way of salvage or sale as a going concern.

He went on to propose a consulting study to determine the LSE’s fate. Coen then hinted at his own feelings by recommending the consultants who had helped Samuel Insull successfully rebuild and modernize his Chicago, North Shore & Milwaukee and Chicago, South Shore & South Bend — implying that perhaps the LSE might be made into “an electrified steam railroad.” Whether or not there was any such hope, the letter clearly recognized that continuing to operate the system as it then existed was undoubtedly doomed.

THE NORTH AMERICAN RAILROAD INDUSTRY WENT through monumental change during the 1950s – conversion from steam to diesel motive power, discontinuance of branch-line passenger service, closing of rural stations, decline of electric-traction roads, and even shrinkage of plant. Iowa and neighboring states were a microcosm of the entire package.

Great Northern’s (GN) motive-power assignments in August 1951 at Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were representative of change occurring throughout the industry. Newly arrived diesel road switchers such as 636, from Electro-Motive Division of General Motors, handled freight duties (a daily-except-Sunday turn to Garretson, a yard job, and calls as needed to Yankton). The venerable 2–8–0 at left stands ready as relief, but calls were few. GN predecessor Willmar & Sioux Falls had completed a line linking those two communities in 1881. GN itself put down the fifty-eight-mile route to Yankton in 1893.

The captions are as the photographer prepared them. Generally, the only changes that have been made are minor corrections to capitalization (for example, “Union Station” for “Union station”), incorrect punctuation or character spacing (for example, “E. K. Hill” for “E.K. Hill”), and abbreviations (such as substituting names of states for their abbreviated forms). James E. Valle, in his groundbreaking 1977 book, The Iron

Horse at War, did not use Delano’s captions, but instead provided his own, extended captions. The design and photographic reproduction in his book does not reflect contemporary art-book standards, but these extended captions provide a wealth of information for those who desire more background on the subjects of the 272 Delano photographs included in the book. The Iron Horse at War covers only Delano’s blackand-white Chicago and Santa Fe photographs; it does not cover his FSA railroad-subject work, nor does it include any color photographs.

To take advantage of their engaged state of mind, students should have opportunities to interact with the information they need to learn. The goal is for them to actively discover, interpret, analyze, process, practice, and discuss the information so it will move beyond working memory and be processed in the frontal lobe regions devoted to executive function.

-Judy Willis

The five senses keep the body safe. The brain is constantly scanning the environment for interesting, novel, relevant things to pay attention to and ignoring everything else. In the previous chapter, we examined ways to engage learners, capturing their interest and attention so that they may participate in the learning process.

Once attention has been garnered, the information is moved to short-term, working memory. It doesn't have a very long shelf life there (perhaps seventeen to twenty seconds [Wolfe, 2001]), and if the learner is not actively involved in some task, the interest will wane quickly. Teachers are challenged with designing numerous rehearsal tasks that cause students to interact with a particular content or skill until it can move to long-term memory. It is during these rehearsal tasks that students explore and develop concepts and skills that will create lasting memory. With multiple interactions, the pathways that receive more use become stronger, smoother, and more efficient.

In the late fall of 1968, Jim McClellan and a friend from the Central rode the train together to Washington for interviews at the Federal Railroad Administration. The FRA administrator, who had been a protégé of Alfred Perlman at the Central and the Rio Grande, wanted one of them to come to FRA on a new exchange program that he was setting up. He selected McClellan, who left behind at Penn Central a memo to Perlman. Even if he hadn’t paid much attention to the financials, McClellan was beginning to see with ominous clarity that the chaos and fighting were putting the railroad on a track to disaster. Accordingly, he sent the warning that Penn Central would not make it if nothing were done to change things. Perlman could be surprisingly tolerant of such ideas, but others in the top ranks of Penn Central could not, and immediately it became clear that McClellan’s appointment at FRA was not temporary, because Penn Central was not going to let him come back. It didn’t seem that way at the time, but nothing could have been more to McClellan’s advantage.

As an inventor, Frank Sprague presents us with a complex character of sometimes seemingly contradictory traits. On the one hand, he provides a textbook example of the “inventor’s shop” model of focused, directed research on a specific set of design problems—working with his colleagues and employees methodically testing and revising designs in a disciplined shop environment. On the other hand, he also displayed characteristics more in accordance with the “lone inventor” stereotype—jotting down ideas and plans as they occurred to him, on nearly any design problem that presented itself during his daily business. Throughout his career, Sprague relied on both spontaneous creativity in recognizing and meeting design challenges, and disciplined, methodical work in refining his ideas. He combined both of these traits with an indomitable sense of purpose and tireless zeal for pursuing and promoting his ideas, as well as asserting his priority to specific inventions or design elements, particularly when he believed himself to be in the right. He must at times have seemed to his “opponents,” and probably to some of his colleagues as well, as something of a gadfly. He did not accept failure easily, and at times persevered against the odds to his cost. We will return to this aspect of Sprague the inventor below.

By the start of the second decade of the twentieth century it became increasingly apparent that war was coming to Europe. Many in the United States realized that despite its isolationism, the United States would eventually have to join the conflict, and that it was neither militarily nor industrially ready to do so, and that furthermore, if steps weren’t taken to prepare the country, the United States might be “knocked out” before it could even join in the conflict. This concern became increasingly pressing once war actually broke out in August of 1914. Although it would be more than two years before the United States finally declared war on Germany, in April of 1917, preparations began for that eventuality almost immediately once hostilities broke out in Europe. A significant aspect of these preparations, and in fact the first, was the formation of a civilian Naval Consulting Board.

The board was seen at the time of its formation as a radical departure from the navy’s standard mode of operation, but one that was necessary given the navy’s need to cope with “the new conditions of warfare”1 that the European conflict presented as well as the unprecedented threat from submarine warfare. It was the latter, most vividly demonstrated by the torpedoing and sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, that was the immediate impetus for the formation of the board.

Strikes alienated customers, angered politicians, and fomented a climate of mistrust. Passengers and shippers began to feel that railroad corporations wielded too much influence. Politicians at every level—from municipal to federal—created regulations to address their concerns. Legal precedents based on US Supreme Court cases originating in Illinois gave the federal government the authority to establish minimum and maximum prices for transporting people and products. These regulations restricted railroad managers’ power to set the prices (“rates”) or negotiate with customers from the 1870s to the 1980s. Lowering or raising rates was painfully slow, hurting railroads’ ability to respond to market conditions and contributing to the ossification of the industry in the twentieth century.

By 1870 three railroads—the Chicago & North Western, the Rock Island, and the Burlington—were crossing Illinois and Iowa and preparing to converge on Omaha, the eastern end of the original transcontinental. They earned increased traffic from the new connection, augmenting the grain, pork, and beef they hauled into Chicago from the rich agricultural region they served. But cutthroat competition among the three lines lowered rates and profits, putting pressure on other parts of the systems to compensate. To dampen the competition, the three railroads agreed to share the traffic across Iowa. This informal “pool” collapsed in the face of economic depression, but after 1874 formal, regional associations emerged to share revenues and eliminate competition.1 From the perspective of the railroads, pools were a rational response, but shippers thought they deliberately stifled competition in the name of higher profits. Regulation ensued.

In February 1940, Roy Stryker, chief of the FSA Historical Section, wrote to John R. Fischer, director of the Division of Information:

We are going to have to move fast to get a new man on the payroll to replace Arthur Rothstein. As you know, it is not going to be the easiest thing in the world to find a man to take hold of Arthur’s job and get into the swing of production in the manner of Lee, Rothstein, and

Post. . . . We have already found the man, Mr. Jack Delano. . . . We have an outstanding person. He is an artist by training, and has used the camera for several years. He did one of the finest jobs on the story of the coal miners in the anthracite region that I have ever seen. A man that can turn out as excellent a job is not to be lost.1

The perceived excesses symbolized by the Reid-Moore syndicate’s bleeding of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway contributed to a political and social climate conducive to further regulation. Behind this renewed regulatory fervor was a fear of dependence on enormous economic entities. Corporations appeared to be getting too big, too powerful, and too likely to control an entire industry. Democratic republics were not supposed to give rise to monopolies dominating entire sectors of the economy, but that is precisely what seemed to be happening. When Minnesota-based railroader James J. Hill and Wall Street banker J. P. Morgan merged the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy into a holding company already containing the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern Railroads, the government called foul. President Theodore Roosevelt, spurning Morgan’s gentlemanly offer to “send your man to see my man and tell him to fix it up,” instead mobilized the might of the federal government and established a precedent for future trust busting.